


Pillows and Photographs

by bagog



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Domestic Fluff, Established Relationship, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-30
Updated: 2015-07-30
Packaged: 2018-04-12 02:07:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,557
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4461206
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bagog/pseuds/bagog
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Shepard's on the mend after the war. As part of his therapy, Kaidan's been taking a photograph of him everyday to show his improvement over time. Tomorrow marks a milestone: he'll actually get to see the photos all together.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pillows and Photographs

**Author's Note:**

> This story is in response to a prompt I got on tumblr. Typically I don't post tumblr prompts on AO3, but this one got long. In August, I'll be doing a bunch or requests, so come on over to bagog.tumblr and maybe make a prompt?
> 
> Oh look, it's a domestic fluff-fest of Kaidan and Shepard laying in bed... it's almost like I only ever write one thing...

Kaidan frowned at the mounds of pillows on the bed. He had arranged and rearranged them about five times—moving the firmer pillows to the bottom and the softer pillow to the top, then sat on the bed and leaned back to test the support, then fluffing and resorting so _soft_ were on the bottom and _firm_ were on top before trying again.

“Okay, I found a few more!” Shepard’s voice came down the hallway from the guest bedroom, voice muffled.

Kaidan made for the bedroom to help him out, but Shepard was already coming down the hall, arms laden with even more pillows. All in all, Kaidan still wasn’t nuts about the idea of his arms being laden with _anything,_ but it had been a long time since he’d seen Shepard moving this quickly, limping left leg thumping the floor boards. His grinning face poked out from the pillows, leaning in to give Kaidan a peck on the cheek as he rounded the corner into their bedroom.

“Just toss ‘em on,” Kaidan chuckled, but Shepard turned with a raised eyebrow.

“You’ve got all these pillows so nicely organized, I couldn’t ruin a work of art like this.” He tipped forward awkwardly and the pillows tumbled down onto the bed. He started finding places for them one-by-one, trying to maintain some sense of symmetry.

“I don’t _care_ how they look,” Kaidan resisted the urge to help Shepard once again. There were still so much wrong with his body that just watching him try to lean stiffly over the mattress to place the pillows was painful. “All I care about is that you’re… y’know. Comfortable.”

“Don’t worry,” his eyes twinkled when he turned to face Kaidan, “I am _not_ going back to the recliner.”

Tonight was going to be Shepard’s first night back in their bed since the morning they woke up together and dressed in a hurry to board Kronos Station. Then the invasion of Earth, the explosion on the Citadel… John had spent months in the hospital, the state-of-the-art bed and various traction wires holding his body together while they regrew the nerves that allowed him to walk. He’d been in a coma for some time before that.

In fact, one of those fancy hospital beds was actually shoved in the closet: Shepard had insisted on going ‘home’ as soon as possible, even if that meant he needed to take half the equipment with him.

And home was ‘their’ apartment on the Citadel. He’d just started calling it that one day.

So the hospital bed and all the monitors had been set up in ‘their’ bedroom, and Kaidan had quickly mastered the skills he’d need tend to all of Shepard’s needs, and the salarian nurse had come in for about 4 hours every day for the first few weeks. Then came the move to the recliner: Shepard had to stay propped up as he slept, since laying prone seemed to screw up everything from his shoulders down.

But finally tonight they had agreed to try the bed. Provided they could get enough pillows to keep him mostly propped up.

To resist the urge to help with the pillows, he put his hands on Shepard’s hips instead. The muscle under his fingers felt strong again, and when Kaidan yawned and squeezed himself into Shepard’s back, John leaned into the embrace.

“You’re tired,” Shepard smiled, yawning himself. The feeling of John’s deep breaths in his arms was familiar and comforting. He’d missed it.

“Damn right I’m tired.” He was practically murmuring into the warmth at the base of Shepard’s neck. Truth was, he was always tired these days.

“Let’s go to bed then, huh?” The relish was obvious in his voice, his fingers twining into Kaidan’s on his stomach. Shepard’s hands were still so cold in his. Tonight, he’d have the opportunity to warm him up, at least.

“Yeah,” he kissed Shepard long and slow, then stepped back, “I just gotta wash my face.”

“Okay, I think I’m gonna crawl in and get comfortable.” His fingers trailed out of Kaidan’s as he turned away.

“Oh,” Kaidan snapped his fingers and pivoted around at the door into the bathroom, “We need to take your picture!”

Shepard, shirt half-off kneeling on the bed, looked annoyed.

“…really? It’s my big night! First time back in a real bed.”

“All the more reason to document it, hm?” Kaidan winked and turned on his omni-tool. Shepard quirked an eyebrow and leaned back into the—frankly ludicrous—pile of pillows, tugged the waist-band of his pajamas down a hand-span.

“What if we make the picture a little more interesting tonight?” The grin on his face would’ve been enough to stir Kaidan’s desire even if his boyfriend hadn’t been shirtless and very obviously willing to pose.

“Heh,” Kaidan bit his lip, “this is last one, did you know that?”

That seemed to get John’s attention, and his brow furrowed.

“What? Really?”

“Really. Tomorrow is viewing day.”

It had been an idea from Shepard’s therapists—his physical therapist as well as his psychological counselor: Kaidan would take a picture of Shepard every day, in roughly the same pose. No matter what, he had to smile. Shepard picked an arbitrary date in the future to look at all the photos chronologically, but he wouldn’t see any of them until that day.

Kaidan had liked the idea as soon as Shepard had sheepishly asked him if _he_ would be the one to take the photos each day. He liked it because, after everything that had happened, it had become too easy for Shepard to believe that he was broken for life. He liked it because it would show Shepard just how far he’d come in so many months, and because too often Kaidan himself only saw what was still hurting John. He liked it because it was proof every day that Shepard was still with him.

He liked it because asking Kaidan to take his daily therapy photos was probably the closest Shepard was going to get to saying “I need you here. Stay with me?” At least for a while. But that’s what he meant when he had asked, Kaidan was sure of it.

“Wow,” Shepard mused, “So… umm… get to see my ‘progress’ tomorrow, huh?”

“Yeah, we’ll watch it together.”

“…okay.”

“Or we can plan a watch party, if you want?” Kaidan ribbed, trying to catch Shepard’s eye again. “I know Wrex is still at the embassy through Tuesday, and Garrus is always in the area.”

Shepard laughed, running his hand over a fresh buzzcut.

“I think they saw enough of me being laid up in the hospital!” He chuckled, “But… so did you I suppose.”

“Are you kidding?” Kaidan scoffed, kneeling on the bed between Shepard’s feet. “I can’t get enough of you.”

Shepard actually laughed at that, struggled to sit up until Kaidan caught him biotically in a mass lowering field and he got up with ease. It was really the best way to help him: just reduce the mass of the body enough where the atrophied muscles could do their own work with natural movements. Of course Shepard didn’t like it, more for what it might do to Kaidan’s headaches than for any sense of helplessness. But tonight he _must_ have been in a good mood, because he wrapped his arms around Kaidan’s neck and kissed him on the lips without a word.

“…we really don’t have to watch them.” Shepard couldn’t quite meet his eyes.

“Sure we do. It’ll be great, you’ll see.”

“Yeah, maybe.” He didn’t seem convinced, but the touch of Kaidan’s fingers over the soft bristle of his hair brought his lips back to Kaidan’s with a smile. Kaidan was already more aroused than he could afford with how tired he was (or how fragile Shepard still was in regards to any kind of sexual activity), and that wasn’t helped at all when cold fingers began unbuttoning his shirt, pressing into the heat of his chest.

When Shepard had unbuttoned the shirt to the waist and exposed Kaidan’s torso, he leaned back onto the pillows, taking in the view with a lewd expression.

“There,” he winced and adjusted one of the pillows, “ _now_ I think I’m ready for my last photo, Mr. Alenko.”

He winked again and Kaidan couldn’t resist leaning down to peck him on the lips once more before switching his omni-tool to camera mode and straightening up on the bed.

“Smile, John.”

And John did. A big, beaming smile from ear to ear.

“Best one yet,” Kaidan laughed at the image on his omni-tool.

“I’ll bet,” Shepard chuckled self-consciously.

In the bathroom, Kaidan tried to cool his thoughts by washing his face and combing his hair back into place. There were dark circles under his eyes in the mirror, and his open shirt displayed a number of scars of his own. But on a whim, he activated his omni-tool again, opened the directory containing the almost 200 images of Shepard. The ‘Therapy photos.’

It wasn’t the first time he’d looked through the album—he wanted to make sure that there were none that would be triggering once Shepard finally got to see them—but tonight he looked through them with new eyes.

There were the early images: Shepard in the hospital, face like torn parchment, eyes slits against the harsh lighting. He was smiling like a man who can’t believe he’s alive, or maybe doesn’t quite believe it yet. His good arm proudly rising into the frame with a thumbs up. Kaidan knew that as soon as he had captured the image, Shepard’s arm slumped back to the bed, but you’d never know from the photo. At the start they had decided that they would always take each day’s therapy photo of Shepard in bed, just before he went to sleep. In the early days, that had been somewhat of a gray-zone: Shepard didn’t get _out_ of the bed for a long time.

This photo was clearly from one of his therapy days: the smile looked hollow. And there were plenty of photos with hollow smiles. The scars on Shepard’s face open and glowing, but casting their own shadow as the sunset filtered through the hospital window. Propped up in the recliner, his smile barely disguising the fact that he was in agonizing pain: he had thought he was well enough to run up the stairs.

Once in a while, the smile was hard. Shepard had learned to grin and bear it through pain in his N7 training, but on days where he knew he’d be going to sleep to nightmares, or when a well-meaning reporter had asked him about Anderson, or facing off against Harbinger… the smiles in the photos those nights weren’t even defiant, they were simply a lie.

Sometimes Kaidan was tempted to erase those images. If they were dark moments for Kaidan, he could barely imagine what kinds of memories those images would bring up for Shepard. And Shepard had seemed so… wary of looking them over just a minute ago.

But then again, the deeper Kaidan flipped into the album, though, the more often Shepard’s smile was genuine. A little smirk here and there, but a genuine smirk: John wasn’t pretending to feel anything other than what he was feeling in those minutes. Propped up in his recliner, set up to face the foot of ‘their’ bed—then occupied only by Kaidan. Once he was in the recliner, going to bed meant talks in the dark with Kaidan, finally being able to wake before Kaidan once he went off the narcotics, watching him sleep a little in the morning until the day he could finally hobble to the kitchen and get breakfast started.

The more mornings there were like that, the more Shepard smiled the night before. And, of course, the last image would be the one Kaidan had taken moments ago: Shepard propped up in _their_ bed in front of a mountain of pillows, face flushed from flirting, scars healed, eyes their proper blaze of blue.

It was the ‘happy ending’ of a story that began long before the first therapy photo had been taken. It was one of the reasons Kaidan had suggested they always take the photo just before bed: in those early days, the only time Shepard got any peace was while he slept, and Kaidan couldn’t count how many times he had kissed Shepard’s brow in the dark and whispered “It’ll get better. Tomorrow will be better. You’ll be able to look back on all this and see how much you got better, that’s what the pictures are for.”

The last photo proved it. And it was one of the most beautiful things Kaidan had ever seen.

++

Shepard was honestly surprised at how comfortable the bed was. Sure, laying in a hospital bed and sleeping night after night sitting mostly upright in an armchair made it easy to remember how soft and comfortable his mattress was. But he had changed in a lot of ways since he last just… flopped into bed with the man he loved. He knew he wanted to sleep with Kaidan again, and he knew that moving from the chair to the bed was a personal goal for himself, but he honestly didn’t believe it would actually feel good.

Yes: he was currently supported by virtually every pillow in the house, and likely he would not be able to turn on his side in the night without wrenching his back horribly. But it felt ‘normal’ enough to let him believe for the first time that maybe he was actually going to heal after all.

He heard Kaidan spit his toothpaste in the sink, and a few moments later Kaidan strode into the room yawning dressed only in flannel pajama bottoms. He had dark circles under his eyes, and his back had been bowing more and more as the weeks went on. It could be a lack of sleep, it might be taking care of Shepard all the time…

“Want me to throw your shirt in the hamper?” Kaidan asked at the foot of the bed, idly scratching an itch below his collarbone. His eyes were already half closed.

“I’ll keep it, in case I get cold.”

“Oh, you’re not getting cold tonight, Shepard,” Kaidan said slyly. He repressed another yawn to give John a sexy smile. He had gotten to _really_ know that look over the last few months of bedrest. That look that said ‘if you weren’t going to crumble like a china doll under my touch, I would do the naughtiest things to you.’

Some days it was just the teasing Shepard needed to get up and get his ass to physical therapy, some days it was just frustrating. But tonight, it was welcome again. The promise of the return to other simple pleasures… just probably not tonight.

“I seem to remember you being plenty warm,” Shepard chuckled. “You saying I don’t _need_ my t-shirt Kaidan.”

“That’s what I’m saying…” Kaidan crawled up the bed.

“Maybe I don’t need these bottoms either?” Shepard licked his lips and Kaidan stooped to kiss him. Shepard deepened the kiss when the lights went down, and when Kaidan settled to the bed against him, he could feel Kaidan hard against his hip.

“Well, Shepard,” Kaidan panted against his ear. “What an idea.” Shepard shuddered as Kaidan wrapped his arms around his chest. “But maybe not tonight, okay?”

“Yeah,” he sighed in the darkness. “I’m… sorry that I can’t…”

“What?” Shepard could just make out Kaidan’s worried face hovering next to his on the pillows. “Don’t apologize, John. You’ve come a long way, and I’m so proud of you. And I can wait.”

They kissed again and Kaidan’s laid his head on Shepard’s chest and snuggled their bodies together.

“This feels… this is great, Kaidan.” And Shepard meant it. He had spent too many nights in the recliner or in the hospital bed dreaming of exactly this moment. Somewhere in the cynical part of his mind created in the explosion that destroyed the Reapers, he believed that as soon as he closed his eyes he’d wake up in the armchair, or the hospital…

Or on the floor of the Crucible, burnt and mangled while the Citadel crumbled apart around him. He felt this on the good days… often.

But Kaidan’s head on his chest was real. So real.

“Oh,” Kaidan yawned, “Gimme your hands, they’re cold.” He took one of Shepard’s hands in his and softly rubbed it, blowing warm air against his palm.

“Hey,” Shepard kissed his head, “Just… it’s fine, alright? I’m fine. Go to sleep.”

Kaidan mumbled something unintelligible, and his head dropped like dead weight back to Shepard’s chest. Shepard smiled, tried to shift himself so he would be spooned up with Kaidan behind him, but the grip on his torso became like a vice.

“Hng, _no!_ No,” Kaidan mumbled. “…hurt… self….”

Shepard rolled his eyes “Would you just go to sleep already!” But his tone softened a moment later and he wrapped both arms tight around his lover. “…you don’t sleep enough, Kay.”

“Mergh,” Kaidan nuzzled into his chest, “Don’t sleep well… if you’re not in bed.”

With that, he was out like a light. John had never seen Kaidan Alenko fall asleep so fast. He stayed awake for a long time, smiling like an idiot in the darkness of _their_ room. The way Kaidan held him said more about how far Shepard had come than the pillows or the therapy photos or anything. His head to Shepard’s chest, his arms were tight around him. As if Shepard were strong enough to support whatever Kaidan needed: his ribs weren’t going to break in Kaidan’s arms in the night, his bones weren’t going to crack if he needed to carry Kaidan once in a while in return for how often Kaidan had carried him. He could be Kaidan’s soft place to land once in a while, too.

More and more, that’s what Shepard wanted more than anything. He might never be able to move and operate physically on the level he used to someday, and it’s not that he was worried about being a burden… they’d had that conversation enough times already. But when you loved somebody, you wanted to do things for them.

So tonight, Kaidan needed sleep. And Shepard could give him that.

Shepard raised one arm, his omni-tool casting an orange glow around the room. He turned on the camera function and trained the holo-lens on Kaidan’s face. In the viewfinder, Kaidan looked… some kind of content. Dead to the world, unreachable. He looked perfect.

Since they’d begun taking therapy photos of Shepard to make a visual record of his progress, Shepard had begun a little project of his own. Not every night, but every once in a while, Shepard would snap a photo of Kaidan trying to sleep. It had started out as a joke: Kaidan dozed off in the middle of their conversation months ago and Shepard had snapped an image.

But the photo hurt to look at: Kaidan, hands in arms resting on the side of Shepard’s hospital bed, eyes still red-rimmed. He looked miserable. In fact, every time Kaidan slept he looked miserable these days. John had looked through his album so many times he knew the pictures by heart. There was the one of Kaidan practically asleep on his feet against the wall of the PT room, waiting for Shepard to make the smallest steps forward.

There were several of Kaidan asleep in his little chair next to Shepard’s bed, wearing his hoodie and covered by John’s leather jacket all night long while Shepard faded in and out of consciousness as the drugs cycled through his system.

There were more than a few of Kaidan napping on the couch just before Shepard’s evening bandage changes. Once he fell asleep on the landing—‘just sitting for a minute’—but it did nothing to stop the black circles under his eyes getting darker and darker.

Then there were the images from the last few weeks, taken from the recliner: Kaidan sleeping fitfully on one half of the bed. Sometimes rolling over to sprawl out on the big mattress, but always stopping and curling back into himself as if there were an invisible wall separating his side from what used to be Shepard’s side. And in every photo, scrunched eyebrows or red eyes or posture on alert.

He didn’t look like that now, not wrapped up in John’s arms, ear to Shepard’s heart.

Shepard was about to take the picture, but hesitated and widened the focus lens before capturing the image. The photo was he and Kaidan, laying together in the orange glow of the omni-tool. The frame was just big enough to show Kaidan pressed into Shepard’s chest, and John’s smile brightly shining in the faint light, breathing-in Kaidan’s warmth and holding him tight. Normally, sleeping was the only time John could see through the brave face he knew Kaidan wore for him, but tonight it was just Kaidan’s face. It was beautiful.

He knew, in that moment, that tomorrow when they watched the slides of his therapy photos, he would submit this as the true last entry.

The photo looked like a happy ending.

**Author's Note:**

> Hey, that was a fluffy piece of nonsense. I'm really flattered you read the whole thing anyway, thank you so much for reading! I like posting for you guys.


End file.
